Threat to liberty?

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When a conservative writer cries "We the People" he invariably is thinking only about the privileged class. Republican candidates for president speak in a disdainful tone about half the population of the United States and all those shadowy "illegal aliens" desperate for government handouts and entitlements.

A while back I read a once popular book in the War on Poverty days: "The Children of Sanchez." It documents in a dramatic literary style the hellish life in Mexico of one poor family. They lived in squalor like hopeless rats. No wonder they dared to dream about the PROMISED LAND on the other side of the Rio Grande.

Anyone in Rhode Island from an Italian- Catholic immigrant background should have no problem empathizing with these immigrants-legal or illegal-from Mexico and Latin America. I commend President Obama here. He is using executive action to deal with a humanitarian crisis. We must not make a fetish of national boundaries. How many proud and arrogant nation states are visible from the moon?

(posted COMMENT on Warwick Beacon letter " Threat to Liberty " by Richard D. Walsh, Dec. 18)